Utterly petrifying.

Lol yeah only Somalis are disadvantaged in Stockholm. You are clueless.

It's stunning how many people don't understand that Boris Johnson is leader of the same Conservative Party that they think they are protesting against by voting for Boris Johnson.

Although you're allowed not to wear one if you have, for example, asthma. No chance of any problems with that...


Also, there's supposedly some volunteer force being set up to remind people, but no-one thought to mention this to the rail unions, whose members are also expected to enforce the new regulation. The unions are threatening to strike.

Wait, so now Boris wants people to look like bank robbers and letter boxes? :confused:

R number above 1 in some parts of England...no health or science experts at the presser...

Fishy as ****.

Are the government providing face masks or is it again going to be the lower paid who bear more of the financial burden?

This pandemic is really not playing fair, doesn’t it know that you just issue a press release and that solves the problem?

Tory MP attended lockdown barbecue with journalists - Spectator deputy editor, Freddy Gray, and Isabel Oakeshott - as well as Richard Tice, Brexit party chairman

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...th-journalists

More details here. The value is between .89 and 1.01 in different areas.

Calls for regional lockdowns, and claims, unsurprisingly, that restrictions were lifted too early.

Grant Shapps, "We only came to Government in December"

So the past 10 years of Tory Govt just gets airbrushed from history.

I assume that’s rhetorical.

They are disproportionately affected by Covid19, so where is the sense in 'disadvantaged children really really need to be back at school because suddenly we care so much about them'?

Can't see the logic of that as asthmatics are considered relatively high-risk (10% of those who die of Covid19 have this as an 'underlying cause').

Advice given to asthmatics is pretty poor IMV as they are not told that inhalers will not help them if they have difficulty breathing due to Covid19 infection. This could lead to unnecessary fatalities due to people overdosing on their Ventolin.

With cctv cameras everywhere you go in London you can be sure they HATE the idea of people having their faces covered.

They will be giving out disposable face masks.

Could be those dud masks that came all the way from Turkey a couple of months back. Wouldn't surprise me as they say you can make your own.

It's OK, he was speaking as his alter-personna, Kenneth Green.

Do you have a link for that. Articles I've seen suggest asthmatics aren't at higher risk. For example:

https://www.medpagetoday.com/infecti.../covid19/86323

Why not? It worked last December. Johnson's platform was 'Vote for me to fix the things my party (including Governments I was part of) have broken over the last decade'. I've spoken to people IRL who have literally claimed to have voted Tory as a protest against the last government! (Not smart people admittedly, but there's enough people that fall outside that category to swing an election).

Just wait, when Murdoch and the Barclays decide the time is right Johnson will be ousted and their papers will be assuring people that they should vote for the new Tory leader who has absolutely nothing to with any decision made in 15 years of Tory rule. But that the Labour leader is Micheal Foot in a rubber mask.

The Tories literally got elected on a campaign of "we're the party that's fighting against the party who have been in power for the last 10 years". I mean, you've got to hand it to them, really.

If Boris Johnson murdered his parents he'd claim clemency on the grounds of being an orphan.

Will they?

I have no idea what you are trying to say, but given the level of social exclusion and disadvantage that many immigrant communities experience it's obviously highly detrimental to their long-term welfare if Swedish schools had been closed.

It's not Swedish middle class people who would experience a disproportionate impact of the closure of schools.

It’s much older than that. :)
The Joys of Yiddish was published in 1968.

Volunteers for Transport for London will apparently be doing it from next week. I don’t know if anyone will be doing it for other rail or bus services; it’s only been mentioned that the volunteers there will be reminding people to wear masks.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...ing-volunteers

It looks as if it might go back a little bit further than that: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/359...d-then-pleaded


Although I haven’t found a quotation of that published earlier than the Rosten one.

Ah, I think the Paranoia manual was quoting that (now you mention it I think it may even have been attributed to Mr Rosen, I read it a long time ago!) but I'm pretty sure that is the exact description they gave, word for word. Chutzpah is a character sheet attribute in Paranoia.

Has anyone told these volunteers?

They don't know they're volunteering yet.

So there'll be a group of people standing around trains all day? I hope they'll be regularly tested it sounds like a recipe for "super spreaders" as well as mindless idiocy.

And at least one at each of London’s 19000 bus stops, to just consider one city in England. Once again our government demonstrates they have no understanding about public transport.

That's interesting, about the ACE2 receptors.

It was in a table producedin one of the many dozens if not hundreds of tabloid articles so I can't point you to it. Obviously, a medical site trumps the hysterical tabloids.

There are times I wonder would "risk of Covid-19 infection" constitute a reasonable defense to spraying someone in the face with bleach?

There has been a lot of discussion and even a little research suggesting that face shields could be a viable (if not perfect) substitute for masks. Tests have indicated that they can protect the wearer from as much as 96% of "immediate viral exposure" from a cough at 18" and 92% at 6'. This compares well with homemade face masks and the cheaper mass produced ones. I haven't seen any research about their efficacy for protecting others from transmission from the wearer, but it stands to reason that if reducing droplet transmission is the goal (as is supposedly the case with homemade and other non-clinical masks) then wearing a mask is going to be of at least some utility.

Face shields would solve the problem of the asthma sufferers' breathing difficulties. Other benefits also accrue. They are less complicated to mass produce than masks of any sort. They are infinitely (figuratively, not literally) reusable, They are easily cleaned. It would even be possible to eat while wearing one, if with some difficulty, making restaurants somewhat less problematic.

On the social front they let people see each other's faces. (I didn't realize how much I would find that impediment of masks to be disconcerting to me personally until I went out on my first foray to the grocery store wearing a mask. Not just because I couldn't see other faces, but because they couldn't see mine either. I learned how much I rely on exchanging even small smiles with people I passed in the isles. I guess that minor expression of friendliness made me feel better.)

So a dispensation which allows asthma sufferers to travel mask free ought to at least include a requirement to wear a shield. Not perfect, perhaps, but apparently far better than nothing at all.

I have a feeling that face shields are going to become increasing popular as time passes.

I was doing some shopping recently and noticed that a lot of the supermarket personnel were wearing face shields. They're pretty simple and unsophisticated ones, but with good coverage. I imagine that people who have to work at a register for a long period would find them far preferable to masks. Especially if your glasses fog up with a mask.

The govt reduced the UK-wide coronavirus alert level on the advice of the “Joint Biosecurity Centre"
Matt Hancock revealed the “Joint Biosecurity Centre” doesn’t exist yet.

The govt announced dentists were returning to work
Dentists say they haven't been consulted about this, or even warned it was happening.

Well, there's some good news, anyway - according to one poll, Johnson's approval rating has dropped 40 points in 2 months

Marr asks Hancock about Track and Trace

“How many people have been contacted?”

Hancock replies

“I’m not going to tell you that”

"...because you don't know, or because it's embarrassingly low? Or both?"

The remarkable story of Mongolia, with zero deaths;

https://medium.com/@indica/covid-und...a-3b0c162427c2

The capital is a large city of 1.5 million people with a density of 307 people per km2 and ripe for infection due to its proximity and regular flights from China. So they went into lockdown in January, closing schools, theatres etc then. All flights into the country since 1st Feb had required quarantining, including the crew. They manufactured a lot of their own PPE.

All of that happened, despite still no cases. The first case was a French national who arrived in February. The office he worked in and the entire district he lived in was quarantined. Everywhere he had been disinfected. There were no transmissions.

They have had 140 cases, all of people who have arrived back into the country and none have resulted in other transmissions.